Swedish Legislators Push for Change to End Drug Trafficking by Mail

The past few years proved to be a challenge for law enforcement and the law in general, regarding drugs. Studies revealed that more and more people tried drugs for the first time. More people accessed the darknet for the first time. And many people admitted that drug usage only became enticing upon discovery of the darknet—where they made their first purchase. Yet, as time passes along, law enforcement and provisional laws continually fail to stop drug trafficking on the darknet.

Sweden, much like the rest of the world, fights to prevent drug traffickers from using the postal system as a personal tool. And according to a local news outlet, Dagenssamhälle.se, the largest obstacle in the path of preventing such drug trafficking is the postal law itself. The Postal Services Act—according to Lars Lustig, the author of the paper—failed aid law enforcement in any conventional way. The law, he said, aimed at helping the postal employees and government in 1993.

“When the Postal Services Act was written in 1993, [drug dealers] were not selling drugs on the Internet, and the number of shipments of drugs sent by mail was small,” Lustig wrote. Lustig holds the position of the County Director of the County Administrative Board of Västerbotten and openly backs the fight for a change to the laws. He wrote that in 2015, the police estimated that nearly 2.5m packages contained illegal narcotics. Additionally, 90 percent of the drugs in the mail flow, in Sweden, traveled only domestically. “Postal staff are involuntarily part of drug distribution,” he explained.

At the end of the year, the county administrative boards, along with the local police, begin testing and training at some key distribution points. For them [Postal workers] to feel safe there at work, they should be able to learn policies and procedures to help them handle these situations. And to help them learn to respond to times when someone picked up a [suspiscious] package. The administrative board of Norrbotten will be connected [in training] with much knowledge about that [Postal Services Act] section of the law.

Unfortunately, for law enforcement, training postal employees—by itself—proved to be insufficient. Lustig pointed, like many at the forefront of these postal changes, to the number of deaths caused by fentanyl overdose. “Since April 2015, close to 200 people died from fentanyl intoxication. Most of the products came from the mail flow.” Under the current law, postal employees have very little contact with law enforcement—even if they suspect that a package may contain drugs. That lack of communication needed to change, he expressed.

In closing, he listed the fundamental changes and their positive outcomes that he, along with other members of the Swedish government, stood behind:

Increased cooperation between police, customs, and postal staff would reduce the staff’s concern about the threat situations they face today.

Law enforcement authorities should recognize ongoing violations.

Reduced availability of drugs via the internet.

The Increased risk of detection could discourage those who want to experiment with drugs.

Streamlining the discovery and classification of new substances of abuse.

3 comments

So anything the control freak dont want or like, they can change laws at will. we should not be obeying any of the government laws anymore.

One day the law is this, the next the law its changed, then someone changes it again. bullshit control.

No one learns from been punished.
No one learns by being put in a cage
No one learns by force/threats/violence.
You only learn by Teaching, helping, training, communication.

Tomorrow the law will be changed again to benefit who ever doesnt like some part of society, when will the laws they keep putting in place end? never? they put more and more laws in place each year step by step. when are we going to say NO LONGER ARE WE PUTTING UP WITH THIS?

I have seen the TV programs where they stop drugs and use xray so this article is not up to date.
You cant take food into Australia without some form of harassment about the eco life etc. lol its a bag of noodles man…

@ausmadman follow the hyperlinked article and now the use of past tense; ”Australia lacked,” as in, at the time of the information request, “sniffer dogs, X-ray machines, or explosive trace detectors.” Literally in the documentation.